... now that is a classic and you can find them on eBay on a fairly regular basis but probably not for long. Those were cool boxes in their day.
They are great! I have one on my desk at home, and I still use it almost every day. It's get 32M RAM, a 2G HD and a 68040 processor at 33 Mhz. A machine like that's fine for editing text, light web browsing, even reading PDFs, the screen is surprisingly clear even compared to a modern flat-panel with ClearType. The machine just "feels" great to use, it remains responsive even under load, and the GUI is wonderful - MacOS X is s step backwards IMHO.
This is why I always post to Slashdot about how modern machines have reached a plateau where they average PC user doesn't get any real advantage from increases in processor speed. Anyone care to post benchmarks for the '040 vs the Itanic?
Second, if the web server is compromised and arbitrary data can be sent to the back-end database, bad things may happen. In a proper setup, the database and the web server are separate systems (ideally with a direct link connecting only the two), and *any* communications from the web server to the database/back end system should be given no more weight than you would give to data coming from a client. Then the back end system validates everything coming from the web server.
Last time I had to solve this problem, I did it using a nonroutable protocol between the web server and the machine that processed payments. In that specific case, an RS232 lead and some extremely simple and hence limited software on both ends. There was simply no way to access the payment processing machine for anything else except by going to sit in front of it - it didn't even have a NIC in it, just an ISDN line to the bank. If anyone did r00t the (Solaris) web server, the most they could do would be to mess around with the HTML, since there's know way (that I know of at least) to compromise an NT server via its serial port.
I know Bush doesn't give too much attention to that, and i wonder if he will ever know what this word means but just give it a try... The world won't last long if the US never change its policics on that (Kyoto.. Johanesburg etc...), IMHO...
I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. As everyone knows, two-thirds of the Senate must ratify a treaty before it becomes law. Senators have the ability to vote on a treaty even if the President does not ask them to. In 1997, the Senate voted 95-0 against the Kyoto Protocol.
What does this mean? It means that even if Bush wanted to ratify Kyoto he couldn't, because under the Clinton administration, the Senate rejected it.
Q. What do you lose by putting a document in as a BLOB?
A. Granularity. The ability to have the database sort and extract parts of files at the tag level.
That's not true. If you've the Oracle documentation to hand, read about interMedia (formerly known as ConText). It gives you extensions to SQL to use XPath-like statements to select from within an XML document in a CLOB.
Sounds interesting, would you care to explain what you did?
Well, a modern relational database isn't designed to be used as a Von Neumann machine - it is massively inefficient to retrieve and process one record at a time. If you can express your query in terms of sets, and let the database worry about how to actually execute it, performance can be orders of magnitude better. And joins are almost always faster than subqueries. And if you want to use a compound index, the query predicates have to be in the same order as the columns were when the index was created.
I'm sure a programmer could tell you plenty of techniques for making a GUI run faster, and as someone with a DBA background, I wouldn't presume to tell him that since it's a GUI onto a database I could tell him how to write it.
Secondly, due to the age-difference, "popping over the cube" is also difficult as the DBAs (being more mature shall I say) are less likely to be excited about a new paradigm.
I guess you haven't been around the industry too long. You see, this is an industry totally driven by fashions and fads (far more so than even the clothing or entertainment industries). Every year there's a slew of new buzzwords and technologies, each of which promises to be the "silver bullet" and a whole new "paradigm" and none of them ever are. So when some bright-eyed bushed-tailed young hotshot announces that he's discovered the solution to the organization's IT ills, all the "old geezers" just roll their eyes, 'cos they've seen it a dozen times before.
However, my DBA completely rejected this idea as too untried and new-fangeled.
The problem with many developers is that they see a shiny new feature, can't wait to use it, and you end up with an application in which a dozen different people have solved the same problem a dozen different ways.
My attitude is usually that a developer can do anything they want... so long as they're willing to carry a pager that might go off at 3AM, and take responsibility for fixing it before the next business day. Amazing how many times they just wanted to try out a new feature without any real need for it.
In your specific case, you could have done exactly what you wanted to do with a view.
This may sound very arrogant, but I think the developer should manage the DBA, often the DBA is a lone-wolf with too much power. Often the poor programmer has to submit changes with about as much hope they'll get done as one might have submitting universe changes to God Almighty.
Yeah, and the accountants use software, so the developers should manage the accountants! And the salesmen! And the canteen staff! After all, a developer wrote the program that prints their paychecks!
I personally have spent half an hour rewriting a developer's SQL that took the run time down from 15 hours to 9 seconds. Having said that, I don't know all that much about writing, say, MT-safe C++. That's why we have specialists in the first place. I'll bet dollars to donuts that your DBA knows far more about databases than you do, even if you know many more trendy buzzwords than he does.
Then you'll love Demolition. Two teams, an assortment of power tools, and races like "fit this car into these suitcases" and "fit this office into this filing cabinet". It's brilliant!
My issue with your post is the implication that any knowledge which is not immediately applicable in a trade situation is "crap". Surely, you must know deep down inside, that technology does not come from the magic technology fairy? It comes from long hard theoretical foundations which are built by scientists, turned into something practical by engineers, and then mass-produced by skilled tradesperons.
If I were a professor looking for grad students to do research, then maybe you'd have a point, but I'm a software engineer hiring people to actually get work done.
If *nix does what you want and Windows doesn't then the choice is made for you.
Serious question: on the desktop, is there anything Linux can do that Windows can't? And apart from at the very high end (100+ node clusters) is there anything?
In my case I operate a public safety system, a 911 dispatch center. Our radio consoles and recording system all use Windows NT and 2K. We KNOW it would be cheaper to use *nix. We KNOW the system would be more reliable. Our CAD system runs AIX and sets a great example to prove the point. All that doesn't matter one single bit. Why? First off it's propriatary equipment and only runs on Windows so we cant change it. Second we couldn't justify the down time for the change and operator training.
Then it wouldn't actually be cheaper, would it? TCO means total cost of ownership.
Seems to me its more important to know algorithms, data structures, how to implement parsers, how to optimize databases(or knowing when its better to use a custom data structure rather than a database), etc.
Problem is, no CS graduates do know this. Sure, they know how to implement a compiler from scratch in 68000 assembly language, but none of them know how to exploit SUNPro or VC++ features properly. Loads of them know about parsers, none of them know how to code to make things easy for a debugger. Loads of them know about fancy research OO databases, none of them know how to design an RDBMS.
But the job ads almost universally ask for knowledge of the specific language. I've worked with C++, Java, VB, Perl, SQL, XML, Javascript, and others, but in my experience knowing what to do with these languages far outweighs knowing the language itself. Why don't recruiters see this?
Speaking from experience, I always try to hire physics, engineering or philosophy graduates for programming positions. CS graduates are worse than useless because before you can deploy them on a project you have to make them unlearn all the crap their professors (who haven't been in industry for 25 years) have taught them.
Last but not least, where are some other languages? What about... blah blah, long pointlesss list deleted
Look, the languages that matter are C++, Java, SQL, FORTRAN and COBOL. I'm sorry the trendy open-source language "de jour" isn't there, and I'm sorry this week's academic favorite isn't either. The fact is, no-one gets paid for their "elite" Haskell or Glish or elisp "skills". Slahsbots can whine about this 'til the sun implodes, it won't make a difference. Learn a corporate standard or, to put it simply, don't bother looking for a job. End of story.
No one uses PHP at an enterprise level, nor is it ready to be used in such a manner
Agreed. PHP users neither hire significant numbers of programmers nor pay significant salaries. That's a fact and I defy any Slashbot to prove otherwise. C++, Java PL or T SQL and COBOL is where it's at, and I don't see that changing for the next 10 years.
We're trying to find a cheap way to get these offices out of the stone age and into an ethernet with centralized, secure file-storage. I was wondering if there is a Linux hardware solution that is fairly dummy resistant or, alternatively, remotely configurable (with decent security).
Get a Cobalt Qube, or whatever Sun renamed them to when they bought the company. Plug it in, switch it on and it does all your typical LAN services like file'n'print, web proxy cache, firewall and so on. All remotely administered via a web browser.
As to whether or not this is a good thing, here's a test, actually find some US workers who havelost their non-buggywhip jobs to having them shipped overseas or replaced by 'guest workers". Stare them in the eyes, tell them you don'tcare, tell them they didn'twork hard enough or smart enough and it'sall their fault. Tell them you don'tcare if they lose their equity, or if they lose their cars, because 'oh well, it'll all sort itself out eventuallylike in the olden days". Honest, just try it, take it beyond academic posting on a forum.
Yeah, on a personal level it sucks. I've been laid off (altho' not because the job was shipped overseas) and I know plenty of people that have been laid off too. With one exception, they all found jobs again easily, within days or weeks usually, those that wanted to that is (some went back to school, traveling etc). There will always be a place for the talented.
So I guess we at least "try". I'd love to buy an all USA made computer, wouldn't bother me a bit my money went to US workers even if it cost more, deal is, can't buy one, they don't exist.
I know what you mean. There are some things I always buy British like Hi fi, pork sausages and suits. But I wouldn't buy a product purely because it was British, if its quality couldn't compete with imports. Too many Western firms grew complacent and let the price creep up and the quality down. The US auto manufacturers are a perfect example of this.
I am not sure but I would wager a guess that the guy who heads up Crysler (and who is German BTW, Dieter Zetsche(sp?)) is most likely on an H1B in the US. I don't think he gave up his German nationality to get a green card.
Highly unlikely, since H1B is specifically for tech workers. It's most likely an L1 (interoffice transfer visa) or a B1 (business entrepreneur). I used the waiver and reentry when I worked in the US a couple of years ago, but if I'd stayed, it would have been on an L1. They're much easier to get if you have a company behind you, altho' they're marginally less flexible than the H1.
BTW, special rules apply if you are a foreign national who a) employs more than 10 Americans or b) invests over $1M in a US business - you can skip many of the stages of the visa process.
all of the finaincal companies(yes the ones who hold the majority of the worlds money)
The money doesn't belong to the banks, it belongs to the investors - if you have a 401(k) or mutual funds, you are an investor. The banks have a duty to use the money as efficiently as possible (I will admit that they don't always do so) and that means keeping costs down.
I was even willing to work for 7/hr like the Indians
The Indians are not working for $7/hr! They are getting paid - and spending - their local currency, the rupee. The fact that the rupee is a very weak currency means it's cheap for dollar-based companies to use them, but you can't compare directly. The Indians aren't paying half a day's wages for a $4 coffee from Starbucks!
Its disgusting and this really pisses me off! What the f*ck did we do to deserve to be treated like this?
Frankly, many self-proclaimed "hackers" bring it on themselves. Instead of understanding the business and being proactive about adding value, they lock themselves away in the server room, doing their precious "geeky" things, dressing in jeans and sneakers, sneering at anyone who can't fix their own computer. The business managers wonder, what are we paying these people for? We never see them anyway, why not outsource them!
Buy a suit, adopt the attitude that IT is there to support the business not an end in itself, and make sure your manager knows how much money you make/save for the company every quarter.
Here's just a basic law of economics, when you move a job away from your border, and the person who loses his job loses his spendable income, that money is lost to the tune of 7 to 1 roughly. If the replacement job-if it even exists-pays less, with less bennies, then it pays less with less bennies, that person and the economy is worse off, not better..
But what about all the Americans who bought Japanese cars? Were they disloyal? Or was it just that the Japanese cars were cheaper and more reliable than their American counterparts?
The US corporate "model" now is just destroying the already existing middle class to create a slightly larger and extremely wealthier upper class, and a much larger bottom tier class, like the model in most second and third world countries.
Economies change all the time. What you describe is nothing new. Think of all those stablehands and boilermen who were put out of work... but that's what happens when cars replaced horses and airliners started taking the place of trains. It was the industrial revolution that created the middle classes... maybe the middle class is on the decline now, but it will be back again, that's the nature of the economic cycle.
This current globalization is a complete and total scam. IF it worked as advertuised and promulgated by the governmental and 'stock market expert" shills, we wouldn't have a 500 billion a year balance of trade deficit.
It does work. For ever American that's worse off, there are many that are better off from having cheaper prices and higher quality driven by competition.
Now anyone might call this a mere "coincidence", or series of coincidences, but I call it a long range loose plan by certain international loyal to no one uber connected rich ones/cartels/groups with both a political and economic agenda that is going to be proven to be *not nice* in the near and medium future, let alone from a long range historical view..
The evidence simply isn't there. If anything, it's the middle classes voting with their wallets for cheaper imports that have resulted in job moving overseas.
To be fair, Babylon 5 did get the Starfuries right.
There's something I never got about the station. You would want to do most of your work close to the outside, to maximize area, and keep the rotation speed as low as possible to avoid mechanical wear. The area of the station at 1G is going to be the most valuable (for humanoids at least), and gravity goes up the further from the axis you are. The station must have a contrarotating counterweight somewhere, because part of it doesn't rotate. So where is "down below"? It wouldn't be further out than the main commercial and residential districts, because all you'd want between them and the outside would be shielding/life support, and it couldn't be closer to the core, because there would be lower gravity, and that area seems to be mostly docks anyway.
That's why I would say Alastair Reynolds sounds like he's writing retro-tech, since why do we need cryogenic suspension if we can simply send shapeships with robots that bio-engineer colonists using genemap databases and some basic chemical compounds once the ship arrives near a habitable world?
Actually, Reynolds does refer to this - in his books, it failed because the robots they sent along to act as "parents" to the cloned humans were unable to do the job well enough to create a viable colony, and they died out. It wasn't until a hybrid ship with a cargo of frozen colonists and a generation-ship style crew (took 3 generations to get to their destination) arrived that that particular planet was successfully settled.
More to the point, lots of the difficulties in space travel come from accomdating the needs of a human biology that evolved under Earth's particular conditions. Would it not make more sense to bio-engineer human astronauts so they don't need things like simulated gravity?
It might be - but bear in mind that any serious expedition is going to have to be accelerating or decelerating continuously for almost all the distance (only pausing midway to turn around) so you get the simulated gravity essentially for free anyway.
What about lifiting "Ginger"s/Segway patents based on the very similar transport devices described in "The Roads Must Roll"? (when they go down under, they talk about the little zippy personal transporters used to move around the tunnels)
You can't patent an idea, only a specific implementation of an idea. I doubt the Segway HT itself is covered by a patent, but its individual components that solve specific problems will be. The point is that unless you do your own R&D from scratch and solve those problems for yourself you won't be able to build one, and even if you did, there's no guarantee that they didn't beat you to the optimal solution. In reality, I'm sure that if you wanted to use some of their technology in a way that didn't compete directly with them, they would be happy to license it to you. That's a win-win scenario: cheaper than you doing the research for yourself, more profitable for them than keeping the patent to themselves.
An example of this is Gillette - you obviously can't patent a razor, but they could patent the specific spring mechanism they use to let the blades adjust their height.
Maybe they will invent those communicaters from ST!!!
Why? They have considerably less functionality than a present day mobile phone. Apart from the voice activation and (I presume) the battery life, they're WW2-era walkie-talkies.
Just think, Picard can travel faster than light but he has to rely on an audio-only channel to find out what's going on down on the surface. Hell, Nokia could be the Federation's secret weapon, the ability to send lame low-resolution pictures back to a ship in orbit! Revolutionary!
Why is that? Because there is no market for "credstics" or EC in consumer markets. People like to see how much money they have.
IBM trialled something like this a few years ago (in Swindon I believe, but I could be mistaken). You had a card, which you would "charge up" with credit, which would be transferred from your account to the card. The basic problems were
If you have to charge up the card anyway, why not just stop at an ATM and withdraw cash?
If the value is on the card and you lose the card, you've lost the value, but a credit/debit card can easily be replaced without you actually losing any money.
Needless to say, IBM and its partner banks didn't introduce the scheme to the general public.
And you should remember that whern you use EC, all you transactions are _tracable_.
That's not necessarily true. It could be implemented that way, but there's no technological reason for it. You just need a way to ensure that one value token can only be decrypted by one owner at a time, and we can do that easily with key-pairs and signatures, so long as there's a TTP to actually issue the cash.
Its goal is "to review past and present SF literature, artwork and films in order to identify and assess innovative technologies and concepts described which could be possibly developed further for space applications."
Anything that is "space fantasy" (like Star Trek) can probably be dismissed out of hand, since it all relies on an inconsistent physics model. The physics of the Star Trek universe are mutable to suit the story, they are functionally indistinguisable from magic spells in traditional fantasy genres. Babylon 5, Farscape et al are no better. - altho' to be fair, both of those place far less emphasis on technobabble than Star Trek.
But there is a lot of good stuff in hard sci fi. My favourite author at the moment is Alastair Reynolds. In his books, humans have colonized other worlds relying on cryogenic suspension (theoretically possible, actively being researched now) and relativistic time compression (a known fact), rather than an FTL drive. If a ship is in orbit it's internal "down" is outwards as a section of the hull rotates to simulate gravity, but while its underway, down is backwards because of drive thrust, and you have to reconfigure somewhat before switching modes - no "artificial gravity". There are no "deflector screens" - if you want to protect your ship, find some cometary ice and wrap yourself in it. Other technologies he uses, like nanotech manufacturing are all extrapolations from current research.
Of course, it is fiction, so there are a few things that are made up (the Conjoiner's power source, for example). But if fiction is to drive research, it could do a lot better than what passes for mainstream sci-fi.
Slashdot Mirror
No way! We'll get the Statue of Liberty back with both arms up!
And find she doesn't shave her armpits!
... now that is a classic and you can find them on eBay on a fairly regular basis but probably not for long. Those were cool boxes in their day.
They are great! I have one on my desk at home, and I still use it almost every day. It's get 32M RAM, a 2G HD and a 68040 processor at 33 Mhz. A machine like that's fine for editing text, light web browsing, even reading PDFs, the screen is surprisingly clear even compared to a modern flat-panel with ClearType. The machine just "feels" great to use, it remains responsive even under load, and the GUI is wonderful - MacOS X is s step backwards IMHO.
This is why I always post to Slashdot about how modern machines have reached a plateau where they average PC user doesn't get any real advantage from increases in processor speed. Anyone care to post benchmarks for the '040 vs the Itanic?
Second, if the web server is compromised and arbitrary data can be sent to the back-end database, bad things may happen. In a proper setup, the database and the web server are separate systems (ideally with a direct link connecting only the two), and *any* communications from the web server to the database/back end system should be given no more weight than you would give to data coming from a client. Then the back end system validates everything coming from the web server.
Last time I had to solve this problem, I did it using a nonroutable protocol between the web server and the machine that processed payments. In that specific case, an RS232 lead and some extremely simple and hence limited software on both ends. There was simply no way to access the payment processing machine for anything else except by going to sit in front of it - it didn't even have a NIC in it, just an ISDN line to the bank. If anyone did r00t the (Solaris) web server, the most they could do would be to mess around with the HTML, since there's know way (that I know of at least) to compromise an NT server via its serial port.
I know Bush doesn't give too much attention to that, and i wonder if he will ever know what this word means but just give it a try...
The world won't last long if the US never change its policics on that (Kyoto.. Johanesburg etc...), IMHO...
I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. As everyone knows, two-thirds of the Senate must ratify a treaty before it becomes law. Senators have the ability to vote on a treaty even if the President does not ask them to. In 1997, the Senate voted 95-0 against the Kyoto Protocol.
What does this mean? It means that even if Bush wanted to ratify Kyoto he couldn't, because under the Clinton administration, the Senate rejected it.
Q. What do you lose by putting a document in as a BLOB?
A. Granularity. The ability to have the database sort and extract parts of files at the tag level.
That's not true. If you've the Oracle documentation to hand, read about interMedia (formerly known as ConText). It gives you extensions to SQL to use XPath-like statements to select from within an XML document in a CLOB.
Sounds interesting, would you care to explain what you did?
Well, a modern relational database isn't designed to be used as a Von Neumann machine - it is massively inefficient to retrieve and process one record at a time. If you can express your query in terms of sets, and let the database worry about how to actually execute it, performance can be orders of magnitude better. And joins are almost always faster than subqueries. And if you want to use a compound index, the query predicates have to be in the same order as the columns were when the index was created.
I'm sure a programmer could tell you plenty of techniques for making a GUI run faster, and as someone with a DBA background, I wouldn't presume to tell him that since it's a GUI onto a database I could tell him how to write it.
Secondly, due to the age-difference, "popping over the cube" is also difficult as the DBAs (being more mature shall I say) are less likely to be excited about a new paradigm.
I guess you haven't been around the industry too long. You see, this is an industry totally driven by fashions and fads (far more so than even the clothing or entertainment industries). Every year there's a slew of new buzzwords and technologies, each of which promises to be the "silver bullet" and a whole new "paradigm" and none of them ever are. So when some bright-eyed bushed-tailed young hotshot announces that he's discovered the solution to the organization's IT ills, all the "old geezers" just roll their eyes, 'cos they've seen it a dozen times before.
However, my DBA completely rejected this idea as too untried and new-fangeled.
The problem with many developers is that they see a shiny new feature, can't wait to use it, and you end up with an application in which a dozen different people have solved the same problem a dozen different ways.
My attitude is usually that a developer can do anything they want... so long as they're willing to carry a pager that might go off at 3AM, and take responsibility for fixing it before the next business day. Amazing how many times they just wanted to try out a new feature without any real need for it.
In your specific case, you could have done exactly what you wanted to do with a view.
This may sound very arrogant, but I think the developer should manage the DBA, often the DBA is a lone-wolf with too much power. Often the poor programmer has to submit changes with about as much hope they'll get done as one might have submitting universe changes to God Almighty.
Yeah, and the accountants use software, so the developers should manage the accountants! And the salesmen! And the canteen staff! After all, a developer wrote the program that prints their paychecks!
I personally have spent half an hour rewriting a developer's SQL that took the run time down from 15 hours to 9 seconds. Having said that, I don't know all that much about writing, say, MT-safe C++. That's why we have specialists in the first place. I'll bet dollars to donuts that your DBA knows far more about databases than you do, even if you know many more trendy buzzwords than he does.
they should try hosting the show naked.
Mmm, Phillipa Forrester was a babe, like Shakira, but Carol Vorderman is a skank, like Christina Aguilera.
junkyard wars is great
Then you'll love Demolition. Two teams, an assortment of power tools, and races like "fit this car into these suitcases" and "fit this office into this filing cabinet". It's brilliant!
My issue with your post is the implication that any knowledge which is not immediately applicable in a trade situation is "crap". Surely, you must know deep down inside, that technology does not come from the magic technology fairy? It comes from long hard theoretical foundations which are built by scientists, turned into something practical by engineers, and then mass-produced by skilled tradesperons.
If I were a professor looking for grad students to do research, then maybe you'd have a point, but I'm a software engineer hiring people to actually get work done.
If *nix does what you want and Windows doesn't then the choice is made for you.
Serious question: on the desktop, is there anything Linux can do that Windows can't? And apart from at the very high end (100+ node clusters) is there anything?
In my case I operate a public safety system, a 911 dispatch center. Our radio consoles and recording system all use Windows NT and 2K. We KNOW it would be cheaper to use *nix. We KNOW the system would be more reliable. Our CAD system runs AIX and sets a great example to prove the point. All that doesn't matter one single bit. Why? First off it's propriatary equipment and only runs on Windows so we cant change it. Second we couldn't justify the down time for the change and operator training.
Then it wouldn't actually be cheaper, would it? TCO means total cost of ownership.
Seems to me its more important to know algorithms, data structures, how to implement parsers, how to optimize databases(or knowing when its better to use a custom data structure rather than a database), etc.
Problem is, no CS graduates do know this. Sure, they know how to implement a compiler from scratch in 68000 assembly language, but none of them know how to exploit SUNPro or VC++ features properly. Loads of them know about parsers, none of them know how to code to make things easy for a debugger. Loads of them know about fancy research OO databases, none of them know how to design an RDBMS.
But the job ads almost universally ask for knowledge of the specific language. I've worked with C++, Java, VB, Perl, SQL, XML, Javascript, and others, but in my experience knowing what to do with these languages far outweighs knowing the language itself. Why don't recruiters see this?
Speaking from experience, I always try to hire physics, engineering or philosophy graduates for programming positions. CS graduates are worse than useless because before you can deploy them on a project you have to make them unlearn all the crap their professors (who haven't been in industry for 25 years) have taught them.
Last but not least, where are some other languages? What about... blah blah, long pointlesss list deleted
Look, the languages that matter are C++, Java, SQL, FORTRAN and COBOL. I'm sorry the trendy open-source language "de jour" isn't there, and I'm sorry this week's academic favorite isn't either. The fact is, no-one gets paid for their "elite" Haskell or Glish or elisp "skills". Slahsbots can whine about this 'til the sun implodes, it won't make a difference. Learn a corporate standard or, to put it simply, don't bother looking for a job. End of story.
No one uses PHP at an enterprise level, nor is it ready to be used in such a manner
Agreed. PHP users neither hire significant numbers of programmers nor pay significant salaries. That's a fact and I defy any Slashbot to prove otherwise. C++, Java PL or T SQL and COBOL is where it's at, and I don't see that changing for the next 10 years.
We're trying to find a cheap way to get these offices out of the stone age and into an ethernet with centralized, secure file-storage. I was wondering if there is a Linux hardware solution that is fairly dummy resistant or, alternatively, remotely configurable (with decent security).
Get a Cobalt Qube, or whatever Sun renamed them to when they bought the company. Plug it in, switch it on and it does all your typical LAN services like file'n'print, web proxy cache, firewall and so on. All remotely administered via a web browser.
As to whether or not this is a good thing, here's a test, actually find some US workers who havelost their non-buggywhip jobs to having them shipped overseas or replaced by 'guest workers". Stare them in the eyes, tell them you don'tcare, tell them they didn'twork hard enough or smart enough and it'sall their fault. Tell them you don'tcare if they lose their equity, or if they lose their cars, because 'oh well, it'll all sort itself out eventuallylike in the olden days". Honest, just try it, take it beyond academic posting on a forum.
Yeah, on a personal level it sucks. I've been laid off (altho' not because the job was shipped overseas) and I know plenty of people that have been laid off too. With one exception, they all found jobs again easily, within days or weeks usually, those that wanted to that is (some went back to school, traveling etc). There will always be a place for the talented.
So I guess we at least "try". I'd love to buy an all USA made computer, wouldn't bother me a bit my money went to US workers even if it cost more, deal is, can't buy one, they don't exist.
I know what you mean. There are some things I always buy British like Hi fi, pork sausages and suits. But I wouldn't buy a product purely because it was British, if its quality couldn't compete with imports. Too many Western firms grew complacent and let the price creep up and the quality down. The US auto manufacturers are a perfect example of this.
I am not sure but I would wager a guess that the guy who heads up Crysler (and who is German BTW, Dieter Zetsche(sp?)) is most likely on an H1B in the US. I don't think he gave up his German nationality to get a green card.
Highly unlikely, since H1B is specifically for tech workers. It's most likely an L1 (interoffice transfer visa) or a B1 (business entrepreneur). I used the waiver and reentry when I worked in the US a couple of years ago, but if I'd stayed, it would have been on an L1. They're much easier to get if you have a company behind you, altho' they're marginally less flexible than the H1.
BTW, special rules apply if you are a foreign national who a) employs more than 10 Americans or b) invests over $1M in a US business - you can skip many of the stages of the visa process.
all of the finaincal companies(yes the ones who hold the majority of the worlds money)
The money doesn't belong to the banks, it belongs to the investors - if you have a 401(k) or mutual funds, you are an investor. The banks have a duty to use the money as efficiently as possible (I will admit that they don't always do so) and that means keeping costs down.
I was even willing to work for 7/hr like the Indians
The Indians are not working for $7/hr! They are getting paid - and spending - their local currency, the rupee. The fact that the rupee is a very weak currency means it's cheap for dollar-based companies to use them, but you can't compare directly. The Indians aren't paying half a day's wages for a $4 coffee from Starbucks!
Its disgusting and this really pisses me off! What the f*ck did we do to deserve to be treated like this?
Frankly, many self-proclaimed "hackers" bring it on themselves. Instead of understanding the business and being proactive about adding value, they lock themselves away in the server room, doing their precious "geeky" things, dressing in jeans and sneakers, sneering at anyone who can't fix their own computer. The business managers wonder, what are we paying these people for? We never see them anyway, why not outsource them!
Buy a suit, adopt the attitude that IT is there to support the business not an end in itself, and make sure your manager knows how much money you make/save for the company every quarter.
Here's just a basic law of economics, when you move a job away from your border, and the person who loses his job loses his spendable income, that money is lost to the tune of 7 to 1 roughly. If the replacement job-if it even exists-pays less, with less bennies, then it pays less with less bennies, that person and the economy is worse off, not better..
But what about all the Americans who bought Japanese cars? Were they disloyal? Or was it just that the Japanese cars were cheaper and more reliable than their American counterparts?
The US corporate "model" now is just destroying the already existing middle class to create a slightly larger and extremely wealthier upper class, and a much larger bottom tier class, like the model in most second and third world countries.
Economies change all the time. What you describe is nothing new. Think of all those stablehands and boilermen who were put out of work... but that's what happens when cars replaced horses and airliners started taking the place of trains. It was the industrial revolution that created the middle classes... maybe the middle class is on the decline now, but it will be back again, that's the nature of the economic cycle.
This current globalization is a complete and total scam. IF it worked as advertuised and promulgated by the governmental and 'stock market expert" shills, we wouldn't have a 500 billion a year balance of trade deficit.
It does work. For ever American that's worse off, there are many that are better off from having cheaper prices and higher quality driven by competition.
Now anyone might call this a mere "coincidence", or series of coincidences, but I call it a long range loose plan by certain international loyal to no one uber connected rich ones/cartels/groups with both a political and economic agenda that is going to be proven to be *not nice* in the near and medium future, let alone from a long range historical view..
The evidence simply isn't there. If anything, it's the middle classes voting with their wallets for cheaper imports that have resulted in job moving overseas.
To be fair, Babylon 5 did get the Starfuries right.
There's something I never got about the station. You would want to do most of your work close to the outside, to maximize area, and keep the rotation speed as low as possible to avoid mechanical wear. The area of the station at 1G is going to be the most valuable (for humanoids at least), and gravity goes up the further from the axis you are. The station must have a contrarotating counterweight somewhere, because part of it doesn't rotate. So where is "down below"? It wouldn't be further out than the main commercial and residential districts, because all you'd want between them and the outside would be shielding/life support, and it couldn't be closer to the core, because there would be lower gravity, and that area seems to be mostly docks anyway.
That's why I would say Alastair Reynolds sounds like he's writing retro-tech, since why do we need cryogenic suspension if we can simply send shapeships with robots that bio-engineer colonists using genemap databases and some basic chemical compounds once the ship arrives near a habitable world?
Actually, Reynolds does refer to this - in his books, it failed because the robots they sent along to act as "parents" to the cloned humans were unable to do the job well enough to create a viable colony, and they died out. It wasn't until a hybrid ship with a cargo of frozen colonists and a generation-ship style crew (took 3 generations to get to their destination) arrived that that particular planet was successfully settled.
More to the point, lots of the difficulties in space travel come from accomdating the needs of a human biology that evolved under Earth's particular conditions. Would it not make more sense to bio-engineer human astronauts so they don't need things like simulated gravity?
It might be - but bear in mind that any serious expedition is going to have to be accelerating or decelerating continuously for almost all the distance (only pausing midway to turn around) so you get the simulated gravity essentially for free anyway.
What about lifiting "Ginger"s/Segway patents based on the very similar transport devices described in "The Roads Must Roll"? (when they go down under, they talk about the little zippy personal transporters used to move around the tunnels)
You can't patent an idea, only a specific implementation of an idea. I doubt the Segway HT itself is covered by a patent, but its individual components that solve specific problems will be. The point is that unless you do your own R&D from scratch and solve those problems for yourself you won't be able to build one, and even if you did, there's no guarantee that they didn't beat you to the optimal solution. In reality, I'm sure that if you wanted to use some of their technology in a way that didn't compete directly with them, they would be happy to license it to you. That's a win-win scenario: cheaper than you doing the research for yourself, more profitable for them than keeping the patent to themselves.
An example of this is Gillette - you obviously can't patent a razor, but they could patent the specific spring mechanism they use to let the blades adjust their height.
Maybe they will invent those communicaters from ST!!!
Why? They have considerably less functionality than a present day mobile phone. Apart from the voice activation and (I presume) the battery life, they're WW2-era walkie-talkies.
Just think, Picard can travel faster than light but he has to rely on an audio-only channel to find out what's going on down on the surface. Hell, Nokia could be the Federation's secret weapon, the ability to send lame low-resolution pictures back to a ship in orbit! Revolutionary!
IBM trialled something like this a few years ago (in Swindon I believe, but I could be mistaken). You had a card, which you would "charge up" with credit, which would be transferred from your account to the card. The basic problems were
Needless to say, IBM and its partner banks didn't introduce the scheme to the general public.
And you should remember that whern you use EC, all you transactions are _tracable_.
That's not necessarily true. It could be implemented that way, but there's no technological reason for it. You just need a way to ensure that one value token can only be decrypted by one owner at a time, and we can do that easily with key-pairs and signatures, so long as there's a TTP to actually issue the cash.
Its goal is "to review past and present SF literature, artwork and films in order to identify and assess innovative technologies and concepts described which could be possibly developed further for space applications."
Anything that is "space fantasy" (like Star Trek) can probably be dismissed out of hand, since it all relies on an inconsistent physics model. The physics of the Star Trek universe are mutable to suit the story, they are functionally indistinguisable from magic spells in traditional fantasy genres. Babylon 5, Farscape et al are no better. - altho' to be fair, both of those place far less emphasis on technobabble than Star Trek.
But there is a lot of good stuff in hard sci fi. My favourite author at the moment is Alastair Reynolds. In his books, humans have colonized other worlds relying on cryogenic suspension (theoretically possible, actively being researched now) and relativistic time compression (a known fact), rather than an FTL drive. If a ship is in orbit it's internal "down" is outwards as a section of the hull rotates to simulate gravity, but while its underway, down is backwards because of drive thrust, and you have to reconfigure somewhat before switching modes - no "artificial gravity". There are no "deflector screens" - if you want to protect your ship, find some cometary ice and wrap yourself in it. Other technologies he uses, like nanotech manufacturing are all extrapolations from current research.
Of course, it is fiction, so there are a few things that are made up (the Conjoiner's power source, for example). But if fiction is to drive research, it could do a lot better than what passes for mainstream sci-fi.